Working with his fellow writer and actor Gerome Ragni and the composer Galt MacDermot, he jolted Broadway into the Age of Aquarius.
James Rado, who jolted Broadway into the Age of Aquarius as a co-creator of “Hair,” the show, billed as an “American tribal love-rock musical,” that transfigured musical theater tradition with radical ’60s iconoclasm and rock ’n’ roll, died on Tuesday evening in Manhattan. He was 90.
The publicist Merle Frimark, a longtime friend, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was cardio-respiratory arrest.
So much of the power of “Hair” resided in its seeming raw spontaneity, yet Mr. Rado (pronounced RAY-doe) labored over it for years with his collaborator Gerome Ragni to perfect that affect. Contrary to theatrical lore, he and Mr. Ragni were not out-of-work actors who wrote “Hair” to generate roles they could themselves play, but New York stage regulars with growing résumés.
They met as cast members in an Off Broadway revue called “Hang Down Your Head and Die,” a London transfer that closed after one performance in October 1964. Mr. Rado bonded with Mr. Ragni and was soon talking to him about collaborating on a musical that would capture the exuberant, increasingly anti-establishment youth culture rising up all around them in the streets of Lower Manhattan — a musical about hippies before hippies had a name.
A musician before he’d become an actor, Mr. Rado began writing songs with Mr. Ragni, which they sometimes sang in what were then beatnik coffee houses in Greenwich Village.
Moving to an apartment in Hoboken, N.J., where rents were even cheaper than in downtown Manhattan, they borrowed a typewriter from their landlord and went to work writing their musical in earnest, transcribing into song the sexual liberation, racial integration, pharmacological experimentation and opposition to the escalating Vietnam War that was galvanizing their young street archetypes. In solidarity, Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni also began letting their short hair grow long.
A museum stroll in mid-1965 brought them face to face with a painting of a tuft of hair by the Pop artist Jim Dine. Its title was “Hair.”
“I called it to Jerry’s attention, and we were both knocked out,” Mr. Rado later recalled. Their nascent musical now had a name.
What happened next would become the stuff of Broadway legend, albeit in fits and starts. In October 1966, on a train platform in New Haven, Conn., Mr. Ragni recognized Joseph Papp, impresario of the then-itinerant New York Shakespeare Festival, and handed him a bound script of “Hair.” Mr. Papp took it, read it and resolved to consider making “Hair” the opening production at his Public Theater, just nearing completion in what had been the old Astor Library on Lafayette Street in the East Village.
Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni, meanwhile, had decided that their lyrics needed better melodies than the ones they had written, and embarked on a search for a legitimate composer to improve the songs. This search yielded the Canadian-born Mr. MacDermot, a most unlikely choice: He was slightly older and a straight arrow, with an eclectic musical background but scant Broadway experience. Mr. MacDermot wrote the melody for versions of “Aquarius” and several other songs, on spec, in less than 36 hours. It instantly became clear that he was the ideal choice for setting Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni’s lyric ruminations to rocking show music.
A demonstration soon ensued in Mr. Papp’s office, with Mr. MacDermot singing and playing the trio’s new songs. Impressed, Mr. Papp announced that he would open the Public with “Hair.”
Yet, second-guessing himself, he soon rescinded his offer, only to reconsider after a return office audition, this time with Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni doing the singing. “Hair” did, in fact, open the Public Theater on Oct. 17, 1967, with the 32-year-old Mr. Ragni leading the cast as George Berger — the hippie tribe’s nominal leader — but without the 35-year-old Mr. Rado, who was deemed too old by the show’s director, Gerald Freedman, to play the doomed protagonist, Claude Hooper Bukowski, even though the character was based almost entirely on Mr. Rado himself.
“Hair,” the impressionistic near-fairy tale of a flock of flower children on the streets of New York, taking LSD, burning draft cards, shocking tourists and making love before losing their conflicted comrade, Claude, to the Vietnam War, ran for eight weeks at the Public’s brand-new Anspacher Theater, generating ecstatic word of mouth and reviews that ranged from perplexed to appreciative. A wealthy young Midwesterner with political ambitions and strong antiwar politics named Michael Butler stepped in to move it, first to Cheetah, a nightclub on West 53rd Street, and then — much rewritten by Mr. Rado and his collaborators, and with a visionary new director, Tom O’Horgan, now in charge — on to Broadway, where Mr. Rado was restored to the cast as Claude.
“Hair” was a Broadway sensation, hailed for its irresistible rock- and soul-driven score, its young cast of utter unknowns, its often-searing topicality and its must-see 20-second nude scene. It ran for 1,750 performances after opening at the Biltmore Theatre, on West 47th Street, on April 29, 1968. (It is now the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.)
“Hair” quickly conquered the culture at large (including the naysayers who found its nudity, flagrant four-letter words and flouting of the American flag objectionable). It played all across America and ultimately the world, engendering a 1979 film adaptation directed by Milos Forman — which was disavowed by Mr. Rado — and a Tony Award-winning Broadway revival in 2009 that Mr. Rado helped guide. The original cast album won a Grammy Award and was the No. 1 album in the country for 13 straight weeks in 1969. (It was inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2019.)
The score generated ubiquitous cover versions: In 1969 alone, the Fifth Dimension’s medley of “Aquarius” and “Let the Sunshine In” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (it went on to win the Grammy Award for record of the year), while the Cowsills’ version of the title song reached No. 2, Oliver’s “Good Morning Starshine” hit No. 3 and Three Dog Night’s “Easy to Be Hard” got as high as No. 4. Among the many others who recorded songs from the “Hair” score was Nina Simone.
“From the start, I envisioned that the score of ‘Hair’ would be something new for Broadway,” Mr. Rado later reflected, “a kind of pop-rock/show tune hybrid.”
“We did have the desire to make something wonderful and spectacular for the moment,” he added. “We thought we’d stumbled on a great idea, and something that potentially could be a hit on Broadway, never thinking of the distant future.”
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